« home

JANINE ZACHARIA:
---------------------------------------------------------
Exclusive: Wolfowitz on Iraq

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talks about the Pentagon’s post-war plan and Saddam’s downfall.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the war on Iraq, talks exclusively with The Jerusalem Post’s Janine Zacharia in his Pentagon office about the U.S.’s much-criticized post-war planning effort and the impact he believes Saddam’s downfall will have on the entire region.

JERUSALEM POST: How do you feel now about the pre-war argument that regime change in Iraq would help with Middle East peacemaking?

WOLFOWITZ: Same way as I saw before: help with it. There’s no magic cure, no magic answer, but it certainly helps to remove a dictator who funds terrorists and incites terrorism and harbored key Palestinian terrorists, some of whom we captured. That’s got to be a positive thing. And I think more importantly, in the longer run, when the Iraqis can demonstrate the possibility of a democratic representative government, I think it will have a good effect throughout the Arab world. Hopefully we’ll make some real progress on Middle East peace before we get to that point. I think they’re mutually enforcing processes. That’s what I’ve said all along.

How about the idea of the "domino effect," that democracy will spread from Iraq to other countries in the region? I don’t think it was an accident, by the way, that we were able to get an unusual level of support from Egypt and Saudi Arabia at [the June Middle East summit in] Sharm e-Sheikh in the wake of the defeat of Saddam Hussein. There are many indirect effects. The fact that we can now get most of our troops, virtually all of them, out of Saudi Arabia gives the Saudis a much freer hand to deal with terrorism internally, which is again a generally positive contribution to the overall climate.

But somehow changing the dynamic within Israel and the Palestinian areas with Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat as the partners? Each of these problems has its own internal dynamic, which is unique. It’s not mainly going to be solved from outside. The point always to me is you don’t wait on one until the other is solved. Solving either one contributes. Remember we were in the mode of people saying, well don’t do anything about Saddam Hussein until you solve the Arab-Israeli problem. That was simply wrong.

The idea of spreading democracy throughout the Arab world: How soon do you think we can see something like that? I’ve tried to really emphasize that these are long-term, evolutionary processes, and I’ve seen it in Asia over a 20-year period… When I became assistant secretary of state for that region in 1982, there was one democracy in the whole region of East Asia and that was Japan. And in the 20 years since then, we’ve seen Philippines, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia. And even in China I think they have a very long way to go but they’re beginning to feel the pressure of other people in the region achieving democracy, and it makes it harder for governments to resist it.

I think you know these changes don’t happen instantly. And it isn’t all going to come out of Iraq. I think the things that the Moroccans are doing so far look promising. I think the things that are being done in Bahrain look promising… Change of this kind is, and should be, a gradual process. The idea that we could live with another 20 years of stagnation in the Middle East that breeds radicalism, breeds terrorism, I think is just unacceptable, especially after September 11.

Some people have said the ingathering of terrorists into Iraq is actually a good thing for the war on terrorism. Do you agree with that? I’d put it a little differently. Building a free and democratic Iraq is going to be a huge victory in the war on terrorism and the terrorists realize that, and that’s why they are trying their best to defeat it. And in fact, in one of the recent al-Qaida publications, they say something to the effect, success of democracy in Iraq would be a terrible thing because it would teach Muslims and Arabs to love life, fear death, and be unwilling to become martyrs. That’s the twisted world in which they live.

A positive Iraq would be definitely a huge defeat for them. It’s not a bad thing to be killing and capturing people like Ansar al-Islam. And people say it’s a lot better to kill and capture them [there] than in Paris and New York. But I think the really important thing… [is] they are behaving as though they understand that our success in Iraq will be a big blow to them.

Is there anything now you wish you had done or considered differently in the pre-war period regarding the post-war period? You mean all this terrible planning that prevented oil fields from being destroyed, that prevented humanitarian crises, that prevented fortress Baghdad, that prevented weapons from being used against Israel… I get a little tired of all these things we didn’t plan for when there was so much good planning that prevented all these things that these critics predicted. Most of these critics frankly didn’t predict the main problem we have today, which is the persistent virulence of old regime loyalists.

We tried very hard before the war to do the one thing that might have made a difference and that was to train pre-Iraqi forces. There were just a lot of people who said, "Wait a minute, this is inconsistent with the diplomatic approach to solving the WMD problem." So we didn’t get as far as we wanted to. If there’s one thing I wish we had more of it was more Iraqis trained before the war. We’ve done very well. I mean, to have gone from virtually none when Baghdad fell to some 60,000 Iraqis in the police and other security forces is pretty impressive.

What about the Iraqi National Congress volunteers who trained in Hungary before the war? That effort seemed limited. Not because we didn’t try, but because there were people saying in different ways in different countries it was cutting across the UN diplomacy. Fair enough. It was a constant tension for the post-war and working to avoid war.

A lot of people in Israel and in the US are focused on Iran. And I’m wondering if failure to find stashes of Iraqi WMDs is going to undermine the US attempts to build cases about other tyrants and weapons of mass destruction. Be patient. Let’s see. You, like everyone else, have jumped to the conclusion that it isn’t there… I know two things. The intelligence on that program was essentially unanimous. There were disagreements on the edges on smaller points. Everyone was convinced of certain basic conclusions. And secondly, Iraq is what the intelligence people call an "extremely hard target."

That’s a kind of antiseptic, technical way of saying it’s a place where people’s tongues were cut out if they talked when they weren’t supposed to, where secrets were kept ferociously and continue to be kept quite ferociously. We have very good people working on it. I assume we’ll get to the bottom of things. It will take time.

When you were booed at the Israeli solidarity rally on the National Mall in Washington in April 2002, how did you feel? I left with feeling that even if they have been loud and in front of the crowd that they were a distinct minority of demonstrators. And when I left the stage, Elie Wiesel, as I remember it, and an Orthodox deputy cabinet member, and a lot of other people came up and said, "Thank you for what you said; it was the right thing, and we’re ashamed of the people who booed." I think it’s a sort of sad commentary when decent human beings, and I assume they were decent human beings, get so impassioned that they can’t see that there’s anything to sympathize or have concern with on the other side. And that’s a challenge. As I say, I really do believe it was a minority of the crowd.

You weren’t sad? I know they didn’t come here to hear that particular line. That line being that we have to recognize there are innocent Palestinians that are dying also. And we know what the cause is and I guess that’s why some people don’t like hearing it. But innocent people are dying on both sides.

Do you have any thoughts to share on Yasser Arafat? Believe it or not, the State Department does foreign policy. I’m going to stay out of that one. I’ll just say this indirectly… He’s clearly failed his people and he’s failed the whole peace process. [The late Egyptian president] Anwar Sadat demonstrated in a powerful way what a deep craving Israelis have for peace. And if a Palestinian leader could come forward in as convincing a way as Sadat did, and say you can have your peace, but here’s what you have to do, I think it would be astonishing how quickly we could get to what most people recognize, I think, as the inevitable outcome that President Bush has talked about of two states living side by side in peace. It’s getting that convincing message across that requires a new kind of leadership.

You have a sister living in Israel and I was wondering personally how you feel about it. Do you worry about her when there’s a bombing? Sure. If it’s too close to where they live I call. But they live with it. It’s impressive how Israelis generally deal with it. It’s a tough thing to live with.

Can you comment on Syria? I would say the most important thing right now is [their] not being helpful on Iraq… It’s in Syria’s own interest, I think [to cooperate with us]. It may take a lot to convince them to not get in the way of what we are trying to do.

I was looking over a chapter of a book you wrote for the 2000 compilation Present Dangers. There you wrote, "Both because of what the United States is, and because of what is possible, we cannot engage either in promoting democracy or in nation-building as an exercise of will. We must proceed by interaction and interdiction, not imposition." Does this suggest we need a team effort in Iraq? I mean Iraq is, in many ways, a kind of special case that was sort of forced on us to use military force because of the threat it posed. I certainly wouldn’t have advocated, I don’t know many people who would have advocated, using military force simply to create a democracy in Iraq. Before September 11, the whole spirit of the Iraq Liberation Act and those of us who supported it was to help the Iraqi people liberate themselves. I think it’s unfortunate that we didn’t do more earlier that might have made that possible. Just as if we had done more for the Bosnians earlier, they might have been able to protect themselves, and we wouldn’t have had to go in there with big international forces.

What I was saying in that article was much more about the fact ideally what we do is try to create conditions where people build the institutions for themselves. Somebody said it’s more like gardening than it is like architecture. If you keep the plants watered and keep the weeds out, they can grow into amazing things on their own, not something you create… We can create conditions where people can build nations for themselves.

In the case of Iraq we have such a stake in having it come out right. And we’re in there in ways we wouldn’t normally choose to be. We’ve got a big job to get the security piece right, and we’ve got a big job to get the infrastructure into shape.

At some point, and most of us feel sooner rather than later, you need to let go and, having created the conditions, let them do the best they can with it. Which is also why we use that word democracy maybe a little too glibly. There are many, many different ones around the world. And we took 225 years to get where we are. The British took four centuries.

I think a more appropriate model for Iraq are the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which are still struggling most of them, all of them really. But they’ve made extraordinary progress from where they were 10, 12 years ago. And I think that’s the right thing to expect of Iraqis and Iraq.